Srini Pillay, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, believes this counterintuitive link between downtime and productivity may be due to the way our brains operate. When our brains toggle between being focused and unfocused on a task, they tend to be more efficient.

　　“What people don't realise is that in order to complete these tasks they need to use both the focus and unfocus circuits in their brain,” says Pillay, who has written a book on the subject called Tinker, Dabble, Doodle Try: Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind.

　　“Serena Williams, for example, has often spoken about how in tennis it's important to be both focused and relaxed,” says Pillay. Warren Buffett is also known for having days in his calendar where nothing is scheduled because he finds sitting and thinking has a much higher priority than filling every minute of his day. It is an approach that Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has borrowed from the billionaire investor.

　　Using the slumps

　　According to research by Harvard University psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, we spend 46.9% of our time not thinking about what is happening in front of us.

　　The key to being productive might be found in using that time effectively through embracing the slumps in our day – those moments when your productivity begins to ebb away, usually in the midmorning, directly after lunch or midafternoon.

　　In the past, Justin Gignac, co-founder of freelance network Working Not Working, left little room in his routine to be lazy. Now, he believes it is important to build time to kick back and let his brain think by itself, and is one of many successful people debunking the myth that working more equals working best.

　　Recently he started lying in his newly-bought hammock each night after work.

　　“I light a couple of candles and then I just lie in the hammock and don’t do anything,” he says. “It's amazing. Giving my brain that space is so crucial and has helped me to learn to survey the whole field, not just the thing that is directly in front of me.”

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